Revision as of 15:48, 4 February 2011

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General background

Designing a Joomla! Website

There are four aspects to designing a new Joomla! web site. These also apply to planning to make alterations(including upgrading versions J1.5 to J2.5+) to an existing site or planning for transferring a site that already exists in another form into the Joomla! CMS.

The content hierarchy:

The content hierarchy is defined as Sections with Categories. (Another way of visualising this, Sections are the labeled drawers of a filing cabinet and Categories are the file folders in each drawer.)

The Sections have been removed and now the content hierarchy is Categories and Subcategories.

Who you expect to use the site and what you want them to be able to do

The layout of the menus and the position of some functionality on the page

The graphical design of the whole site

These should all be based on the purpose and expected content of the site, so you do need a clear idea of what you are trying to communicate and plan accordingly. Easier said than done!

Who is it written for?

Everyone

You will have seen references to permissions in the documents about Articles because they can be restricted to one of the three groups (Public, Registered and Special). In creating Section, Categories and Menus, the same Access levels are available.

Permissions to do things: Access Control

There are different levels of permissions for doing things in a Joomla! Web site. In particular there is a distinction between:-

Which users can gain access to what parts of the website? For example, will a given Menu Item be visible for a given user?

What actions a user can perform? For example, can a user edit or publish an article?

Users are grouped together in groups. In Joomla! 1.5 these groups give a robust but fairly simple distinction between groups. It has a coarse granularity in that you cannot set permissions to small groups or individuals, as you can using some software.

Front-end is the web site you can see. If you are an 'Author' - you can only edit pages that you have created. So if you look at the pages done by other people - you will be able to read them but there will not be an edit icon associated with the Article. However, the list below shows that Publishers and Editors can edit any article - which sounds easy but needs some care where there are a lot of people submitting content.

Back-end is the Administrators section of the Web site.

The following lists the groups and associated permissions:-

Front-end Groups

These groups can only use the front-end of the website.

Guest

Can view the parts of the Site that are not restricted to one of the other two groups.

Registered

Guest Group privileges

Can view Articles which have been given Registered Permissions

Author

Registered Group privileges

Create new articles but cannot publish articles

Edit articles they own

View special content

Editor

Author Group privileges

Can edit all articles, even those that are not published

Publisher

Editor Group privileges

Can publish articles

Back-end Groups

These groups allow you to log into the Administrator Back-end

Manager

Publisher Group privileges

Can login to the Administrator Back-end

Administrator

Manager Group privileges

Can create new users

Can install extensions

Super-Administrator

Administrator privileges

Can change site template

Can change global configuration

The permissions are allocated to usernames by the Administrator and managed through User Management interface in the Back-end of Joomla.

User permissions for a new site

You may not yet know enough about your new site to know how best to plan the management of users. The important idea to carry forward into the next few documents on design of the content and menus is that:-

you may want an idea of whether you want to site to be open to everyone to read

you may want to register all users, but limit them to be able to read the content without changing it.

you may want some users able to manage the content

you may want one or more users to manage the site

It is good to have some idea of whether some menus or Articles will need to be available to a restricted number of users.